Reel Entropy

Dracula Begins Dracula Untold is a cliché-addled movie, ridden through with examples of everything moviemakers are consistently getting wrong right now.

Charles Dance is wonderful as the unnamed master vampire, who offers Vlad III a Faustian bargain to protect his homeland from the Turks. This storyline is largely ignored for the rest of the movie. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.

In its bizarre version of Vlad III Tepes’ (Luke Evans) story, the Transylvanian prince was raised a child soldier in the Turkish army. Vlad was a feared warrior, killing thousands on the battlefield in service of the Ottoman Empire, earning him the moniker “The Impaler.” Ten years later, Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper) requests another batch of 1,000 child soldiers, and Vlad kills several messengers in response. The sultan marches on Transylvania, which has no standing army. Vlad makes a deal with an unnamed master vampire (Charles Dance) for the power to single-handedly defend his country.

The film is a computer-generated museum of annoying habits in action and horror movies from the last few years.

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Oh look, a mysterious, ghostly woman all in white in a movie that was supposedly upset by mild supernatural occurrences behind the scenes. Where have we seen this before? Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Motion Pictures.

Annabelle is one of the worst movies ever made and James Wan needs to, just, quit.

He only serves as a producer for this spin-off of last year’s The Conjuring. That film opened with a creepy doll named Annabelle, and this movie focuses on that doll’s origin. In 1967 during the beginning of the Charles Manson murders, the neighbors of the Gordons, Miya and John (Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton), are murdered by satanic Helter Skelter cultists,* one of whom possesses the incredibly creepy doll John just got Miya in celebration of their first child. Haunted doll related shenanigans ensue.

This movie is so awful and boring and stupid and, just, every manner of bad thing that can be said about a film, just like everything else in James Wan’s little string of terrible yet bafflingly successful horror movies. Starting with Insidious, which was an offshoot of the Paranormal Activity brood and continuing with Insidious: Chapter 2, The Conjuring and now this turd.

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So, it turns out that … gyaaah, I can’t spoil it!

The movie Gone Girl, based on screenwriter Gillian Flynn’s massively successful 2012 novel, follows Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) after the other part of his unhappy marriage, Amy (Rosamund Pike), disappears on their fifth anniversary. The movie intercuts between Dunne dealing with police and media scrutiny as the primary suspect in her disappearance and the diary Amy Dunne left behind.

At least, that’s the first leg of the movie. The structure changes when … gyaaah, I can’t spoil it!

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The Equalizer was adapted from a 1980s television series, and it’s pretty easy to tell.

Robert McCall sits calmly in the home of the main villain, having already rigged the encounter to his favor. In this scene, he keeps turning the light on and off for no apparent reason. Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures.

The movie stars Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, a retired special forces agent living the quiet life in. McCall is struggling with a case of superheroism, which he succumbs to over the course of the movie, at least partially because he chose to live in the poorest, most crime-ridden area of Boston he could find. Early in the film, McCall draws the attention of the Russian mafia when he takes down a sex trafficking ring that was its main hub in the city.

The only real problem with The Equalizer is, unfortunately, a big one. It’s very episodic. It doesn’t feel like watching a movie, it feels like watching a full season of a television show. Early on they establish McCall and the primary arc with the Russian mob, then they show him in a couple of side adventures where he’s training a coworker to be a security guard and then he’s beating up some seemingly unrelated corrupt cops and then he’s beating up this random thief oh, and then, eventually, we’ll get back to the main arc. It doesn’t help that his side adventures are intercut with the bizarrely shot and oddly erotic escapades of Teddy (Marton Csonkas), the mob’s enforcer.

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